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A year in corrections: Corrections in the Star increased by just over 10 per cent in 2012

As we end the year when the world didn’t end, we might all serve ourselves a nice slice of humble pie and utter the prayer of the mistaken: Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa.

Last month, the Star published a recipe for said humble pie, a real offal delicacy and a metaphor for one’s acceptance of humiliation in the face of error. More on that in a minute.

Certainly, those of us who erred in the Star in 2012 feel properly humiliated. Lord knows — as do all you readers — humbling mistakes happen with concerning frequency, both in print and online.

The Star published 415 corrections in 2012 for mistakes that made it into the newspaper and, for most, online too. As well, we made a further 280 corrections to web-only content.

The 415 print corrections are an increase of just over 10 per cent from the 366 corrections published in 2011. Of more concern to me is the continuing upward trend: Last year, we logged a similar 10 per cent hike from the 328 corrections published in 2010.

Still, this year’s tally of print errors is somewhat less than some year’s past. In 2007, the Star published 497 corrections. In 2006, the number was an all-time high of 512.

In coming days, I’ll report further on these numbers to the Star’s publisher and editor, who, undoubtedly, will push further to know why corrections have increased and how mistakes happen.

Several factors are involved, I think. Certainly, with the newsroom’s move to “digital-first” 24/7 publishing, more news and feature content is being published at a quicker pace than ever. That goes a long way toward explaining online-only errors.

And, with fewer copy editors in the Star’s newsroom, there is now less copy editing of both online and print content than in days past. That’s an unfortunate reality of a downsized news industry throughout North America.

As well, journalists operate now in a world where every reader is a fact-checker and the means of reporting errors is easier than ever. To its credit, the Star, more than any other news organization in Canada, actively encourages its readers to report errors through the online “Report an Error” function.

And report them, you do.

The 2012 Year in Corrections report, compiled by public editor associate Maithily Panchalingam, tells me that readers and sources cited in stories reported two-thirds of the errors that led to corrections. Newsroom journalists owned up to the other third. I’d be happier to see that ratio flipped and have journalists bring forward their errors before readers catch them.

The majority of the 415 errors are classified as writing errors, made by reporters (209), columnists (52), freelance writers (43) and editorial writers (2). With just under 100 “editing errors,” it’s easy to conclude that writers are responsible for most of the Star’s mistakes. But editors are supposed to “catch” errors before publication, so this is a team issue.

In the past year, we published 100 corrections for incorrect names in the newspaper, sadly, up from 68 in 2011 and nearly a quarter of all mistakes. We also corrected 30 reported numerical errors. (Future column: why are some journalists so math challenged, anyway?)

We corrected to right wrongs in the facts of history, geography and science. Clearly, those Star readers who catch many of these errors are smart folks whose expertise in complex matters is often well beyond that of the “instant expertise” of journalists.

We also corrected the types of errors that inconvenience you and make you question the Star’s basic credibility — wrong locations, incorrect telephone numbers. For all of the corrections in telephone numbers published, I wonder if we need a new corrections headline: “Sorry, wrong number.”

Clearly, the recipe for a perfect newspaper and website has yet to be found. And while no one at the Star ever minimizes errors, sometimes we do have to laugh when mistakes make it into the mix.

Back to that piece on humble pie. Unfortunately, a typo created a misspelling in the surname of the director of the George Brown chef school so a correction was published.

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